This man of faith and wisdom taught us about love and tolerance

Bishop Melvin E. Wheatley, who risked censure in the United Methodist Church for appointing his denomination's first openly gay pastor in 1982, died March 1 in Mission Viejo after a lengthy illness, a church spokesman said. He was 93.

Wheatley was known for promoting dialogue across faiths and cultures during nearly two decades in Los Angeles as senior pastor of the Westwood United Methodist Church. As an associate pastor in Fresno during World War II, he caused a stir when he moved into the home of a Japanese American family to protect it from vandals after the family was ordered into an internment camp. Two decades later in Westwood, he broke down racial barriers by exchanging pulpits with the Rev. L.L. White of Holman Methodist Church in Central Los Angeles. The exchange took place in 1964, a year before the Watts riots.

Wheatley "was a visionary for the whole church," said the Rev. Donald Messer, president emeritus of the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, who knew Wheatley for 30 years. "He was the Martin Luther of the Methodist Church. He freed all of us to be less prejudiced, biased and dogmatic."

"like an emerald-cut diamond "

With few people willing to spend $1,500 on a coffee table, let alone $15,000, will anyone buy furniture that not only looks like an emerald-cut diamond but also costs as much as one? Alexandra Von Furstenberg's 15-grand Bullet table consists of clear acrylic panels fused with black and mirrored accents in beveled configurations that reflect and refract light as you move around them. Art Deco geometry, meet Studio 54 decadence. 9001 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood; (310) 777-0253; alexandravonfurstenberg.com.

-- David A. Keeps

"Witnesses said huge flames shot into the air amid billowing smoke"

At least four people are dead and 50 others injured after fire raced through the upper levels of Bangladesh's largest shopping mall on Friday.

Witnesses said huge flames shot into the air amid billowing smoke as hundreds of panicked people, many of them carrying shopping bags, fled the 22-storey Bashundhara City mall in the capital, Dhaka.

An air force helicopter plucked survivors from the roof of the high-rise complex, which houses more than 2,000 stores and cafes, said fire official Mahbubur Rahman.

High Flying Spying

Reporting from Washington -- The Pentagon said Thursday that it intends to spend $400 million to develop a giant dirigible that will float 65,000 feet above the Earth for 10 years, providing unblinking and intricate radar surveillance of the vehicles, planes and even people below.

"It is absolutely revolutionary," Werner J.A. Dahm, chief scientist for the Air Force, said of the proposed unmanned airship -- describing it as a cross between a satellite and a spy plane.

The 450-foot-long craft would give the U.S. military a better understanding of an adversary's movements, habits and tactics, officials said. And the ability to constantly monitor small movements in a wide area -- the Afghanistan- Pakistan border, for example -- would dramatically improve military intelligence.

"streamlined midget racing auto"

This article appeared in Mechanix Illustrated, September, 1938 issue.

Just when you think Republicans can't get any dumber, along come these two

John and Ken are on A M radio every afternoon. You can catch their comedy show on K F I (I think that stands for "known for idiocy." John and Ken love to rant and rave and sometimes they even have a point.

The Joseph P. Kennedy family earlier and later

In the introduction of Cari Beauchamp's crackling page-turner "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years," this top-flight film historian declares that the father of JFK "saw everything and everyone, from Gloria Swanson to Adolf Hitler, through a lens of dollars and cents." Beauchamp demonstrates again and again that, apart from his abiding love and concern for his nine children (and perhaps a few others, including Marion Davies), the bottom line was everything.

Big Plans for Hollywood Park Tomorrow

A rendering shows the Hollywood Park Tomorrow development plans for an area that will anchor the Century Boulevard and Prairie Avenue in Inglewood. Developers intend to unveil a model of the retail district that would be built on the Inglewood site. The project, which would also include residences, must still be approved by the city.

Civic Center Park takes Shape

It is the kind of topsy-turvy switch the culture is full of these days. For months, the planned Civic Park downtown languished as a much-overlooked sibling to a huge $3-billion mixed-use development on Grand Avenue designed by Frank Gehry for the developer Related Cos. Setting aside $50 million to help finance the park was, literally, the price Related had to pay to strike a deal with the Grand Avenue Committee, which controls the publicly owned land on which Gehry's commercial development as well as the park would rise.

But now, with the commercial portion of the development delayed by financing troubles, the park has emerged as the more viable of the two projects. A substantial chunk of funding for its first phase -- $56 million, including interest that has accrued from Related's original payment -- is sitting in the bank, ready to be spent.

That makes the park, which would cover four parcels of land running downhill between the Music Center and the steps of City Hall, the rare development project whose funding, at least for an initial phase, is secure. Construction is scheduled to begin a year from now, with a sizable "event lawn" opening along Spring Street as early as 2011.

Watching "the snow melting into the sky"

A skier flies past snow-covered trees, enjoying an ideal combination of fresh snow and sunshine at Mt. Waterman in mid-February.

Over-the-top Vegas

Christian Audigier, the man behind the Ed Hardy tattoo tees, has brought his over-the-top tackiness to Las Vegas. The designer, who threw a huge birthday blowout attended by Britney Spears and Michael Jackson in L.A., has a club named after himself at the Treasure Island Casino.

Time to settle a rumor about Lincoln's watch

Reporting from Washington -- For more than 150 years, Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch had been rumored to carry a secret message from the Civil War, supposedly written by an Irish immigrant and watchmaker named Jonathan Dillon.

Dillon, working in a Maryland watch repair shop in 1861, told family members that he -- by incredible happenstance -- had been repairing Lincoln's watch when news came that Ft. Sumter had been attacked in South Carolina. It was the opening salvo of the Civil War.


Dillon told his children -- and, half a century later, a reporter for the New York Times -- that he opened the watch's inner workings and scrawled his name, the date and a message for the ages: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a president who at least will try."

He then closed it up and sent it back to the White House. Lincoln never knew of the message. Dillon died in 1907.

The watch, meanwhile, was handed down and eventually given to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958. It didn't run anymore. No one had pried open the inner workings in ages. The old watchmaker's tale was just that.


Then Douglas Stiles, Dillon's great-great-grandson, alerted Smithsonian officials to the family legend last month. He was a real estate lawyer in Waukegan, Ill., he explained. He'd heard the legend around the dinner table as a child, but had just discovered a New York Times article from 1906, quoting Dillon as telling the story himself.

Truth? Lore?

On Tuesday morning, in a small conference room on the first floor of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, officials decided to find out.

Expert watchmaker George Thomas used a series of delicate instruments -- tweezers, tiny pliers -- to pull apart Lincoln's timepiece.

He put on a visor with a magnifying lens and talked as he worked. Some of the pins were nearly stuck, he explained. The hands of the watch were original, with a case made in America and the workings from Liverpool.

The Illinois rail-splitter had splurged: The watch, Thomas said, would be the equivalent to a timepiece costing "$5,000 or more" today.

Then he pried off the watch's face, pulled off the hands, and turned it over to see the brass underside of the movement.

The audience, watching a monitor, gasped.

Split into three different sections to get around the tiny gears was this razor-thin etching: "Jonathan Dillon April 13, 1861. Fort Sumpter [sic] was attacked by the rebels on the above date. Thank God we have a government."

The old man's memory had not been exact. He had not forecast the end of slavery, or Lincoln's crucial role in its demise. And the fort had actually been attacked on April 12.

But it was there, a little bit of history that had been resting on Lincoln's hip, unseen during days of war and rebellion, the Emancipation Proclamation and the rest, and then resting, unseen, for more than a century and a half.

Stiles was delighted. "That's Lincoln's watch," he said, "and my ancestor wrote graffiti on it!"

Neely Tucker writes for the Washington Post.

Race of the Caltech robots

Competitors at Caltech maneuver their robots to scoop up ping-pong balls before crawling up a ramp and depositing them in “scoring receptacles.”

Combine a land shark with a paddle-wheel boat, spice it with servo motors and radio transceivers, mix with water and what have you got? At Caltech, you have the year's biggest sporting event.

At Tuesday's competition, engineering students at the Pasadena campus operated hand-built robots and maneuvered them through an obstacle course that included concrete walkways, a shallow pond and a finish line atop an arching bridge.

A crowd of about 300 encircled Millikan Pond and cheered as the competing students hovered over remote controls and commanded their amphibious vehicles to toss competitors into the water, scoop up colored ping-pong balls, crawl up a ramp and deposit the balls into "scoring receptacles."

(Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Niemeyer's Cathedral of Braslia

The Catedral Metropolitana Nossa Senhora Aparecida in the capital of Brazil is an expression of the architect Oscar Niemeyer. This concrete-framed hyperboloid structure, seems with its glass roof to be reaching up, open, to heaven. On 31 May 1970, the Cathedral's structure was finished, and only the 70 m diameter of the circular area were visible. Niemeyer's project of Cathedral of Braslia is based in the hyperboloid of revolution which sections are asymmetric. The hyperboloid structure itself is a result of 16 identical assembled concrete columns. These columns, having hyperbolic section and weighing 90 t, represent two hands moving upwards to heaven. The Cathedral was dedicated on 31 May 1970.

"the best preserved of Norway's 28 extant stave churches"

The Borgund Stave Church in Lrdal is the best preserved of Norway's 28 extant stave churches. This wooden church, probably built in the end of the 12th century, has not changed structure or had a major reconstruction since the date it was built. The church is also featured as a Wonder for the Viking civilization in the video game Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings.

"Starry Night"

"Starry Night", a song by Don McLean, became the No. 12 hit in the U.S. In 1971. Written as a tribute to the painter Vincent van Gogh, it describes his different paintings. and is a reference to his most famous painting- "Starry Night" (shown above).

It was painted when he was in an mental asylum and that he sold only one painting during his lifetime caused him to fall into an abyss of depression which eventually led to his suicide.
Like so many artists with sensitivity needed to create their art, how tragic to have felt so hopeless and mis-understood in spite of being so gifted !

His paintings are worth millions each today.

"Atlantis, the Palm"

The pink twin-towered hotel is the centerpiece of the resort, which sports an Atlantis theme. For the super-rich, there’s the $25,000-a-night suite that spans the bridge connecting the hotel’s two towers.

Visitors are dwarfed by the Ambassador Lagoon at Atlantis, the Palm, Dubai’s latest and possibly greatest luxury hotel to date, where water is an ornament and a plaything. Anchoring the place is the three-story aquarium, which holds 2.9 million gallons of water and an abundance of exotic and dangerous-looking marine life.

Aquaventure’s water slides send guests twisting and turning. The launch pad for the half-dozen slides of varying degrees of scariness is the water park’s 98-foot-high ziggurat. And surrounding the tower is a network of pools connected by meandering rivers and water escalators, meaning you almost never have to get off your inner tube.

For the bold and the brave, there’s the Leap of Faith — a near-vertical nine-story drop down a ziggurat — at the resort’s Aquaventure, a 42-acre water park filled with slides and pools. Too wild? Head over to a nearby saltwater enclosure, where guests can swim with the resident dolphins.
(Chris Vedelago)

Adventurers and their Rewards

Snow covers Ama Dablam as a climber and beasts of burden pause on their way up the unrelenting trail to Kala Pattar. The 18,450-foot-high peak in Nepal’s Khumbu region features staggering views of Mt. Everest and neighboring glaciers.
(Jeff Greenwald)

The Fence that Floats

Riding an all-terrain vehicle, a U.S. Border Patrol agent inspects a fence for signs of illegal alterations. The unique design of the steel fence allows it to "float" atop the wind-blown sand. With the economy in tatters and security beefed up at the U.S.-Mexico border, fewer people are willing to cross illegally. Arrests in the last five months are down 24% from the same period last year.

Bay to Breakers Breaks all the Rules

Reporting from San Francisco -- It's too soon to tell if the party people have won.

But after weeks of civic soul searching from City Hall to cyberspace, it's beginning to look as if Baghdad by the Bay will survive the latest threat to its reputation as the capital of free expression.

For a while, though, it was touch and go here in the city that brought you the Summer of Love, Burning Man and the Folsom Street Fair (the self-proclaimed "granddaddy of all leather events").

The organizers of Bay to Breakers -- the raciest footrace in America -- set off the hand-wringing when they announced last month that nudity, alcohol and floats would be banned from the infamous annual competition, which has transformed over the last 97 years into a Pilsener-fueled party on Pumas.

In any other city in America, it probably wouldn't be necessary to tell participants in a 12-kilometer race that they are not allowed to strip to their running shoes and push a keg in a shopping cart while sipping a tall cold one.

But San Franciscans have spent the last 160 years taking their fun very seriously, and people here in "The City That Knows How" know a threat to their image when they see one.

Even the fans watching the event get in on the fun.

Historic Grass Valley bar in danger of closing

HOLBROOKE HOTEL by Keith Hopkins. The Artist's rendition of the old Grass Valley landmark the Holbrooke Hotel. Rendered in watercolor, the original is 14x20, with the essence of Color and expressive detail bring this piece to life.

A plaque on the outside of the Holbrooke Hotel describes how the bar of the hotel has been in continuous operation since 1852, when it opened as the Golden Gate Saloon. The Holbrooke, which includes a restaurant and a catering business, employs 38 people and is a popular meeting place.

The Holbrooke Hotel includes the Golden Gate Saloon, said to be the oldest continually operating bar west of the Mississippi. It is likely to close unless a buyer comes forward, a co-owner says.

"the man we love to watch"

Buster Keaton just might be the silent clown best suited to modern times, the man we love to watch, as purely American a film genius as the motion pictures have produced. A master of both movement and stillness, Keaton developed a comedy style that was as intellectual as it was physical. And, just when we need him most, Cinefamily is mounting a rare big-screen Keaton feature retrospective at its 611 N. Fairfax theater. "Our Hospitality" will be showing at 8 p.m. Wednesday, a double bill of "The Navigator" and "Sherlock Jr." will screen March 18, with "Seven Chances" on March 25 and more to come in April; www.cinefamily.org.

-- Kenneth Turan

Dearden's store in Los Angeles survives for a century

Dearden's downtown L.A. store at 7th and Main streets, shown in 1979, started out as a small furniture seller. It has expanded its selection of goods over the years to include perfume, watches, cookware and more. This is just the latest recession that the downtown seller of furniture and other items has faced. The ability to change is seen as a factor in its staying power. In today's retail environment, stores are lucky to keep their doors open. Dearden's, a furniture, electronics and appliances store in downtown Los Angeles, has done it for 99 years. And fingers are crossed for many more.

Don't get taken by these stimulus scams

Want a personal piece of the $787-billion stimulus pie? Don't look for it in online ads that promise individuals a share of the money. They're scams, warn the Federal Trade Commission and the Council of Better Business Bureaus, which have tracked several sites and Facebook ads that offer consumers thousands of dollars in stimulus grants.

An experience like no other

You have to admit, Preikestolen in Stavanger, Norway is impressive.
Preikestolen means Pulpit Rock.
Here we have the "Mortised Boulder" . . .
and here we have nerves of steel or utter stupidity.

The "pot of gold" goes poof

Shown above, an artist's rendering of the proposed U2 Tower in Dublin which would be Ireland's tallest building, complete with luxury apartments and a recording studio for Bono and the U2 boys.

But the project is now on hold and may even be dead -- a victim of the worldwide credit crunch and a nose-diving Irish economy.

When the European Union's poorer members warned the richest countries last weekend of a "new Iron Curtain" coming down on the continent, they were talking not only about the need to bail out the countries of the former East Bloc. They also meant countries like Ireland, which, after two decades of growth that made it Europe's fastest-growing economy, is now one of its biggest busts.

ANN COULTER SAYS:

"I always wanted to run the NEA so I could fund only tacky bourgeois art, such as Precious Moments figurines, thimble collections, dogs playing poker, velvet Elvis paintings, "Scarface" mirrors from the gift shops by the beach, etc. I'd have a major retrospective on Norman Rockwell paintings and make Thomas Kinkade our painter laureate."

Sound scary -- well, it should because she's serious.

'I can't believe I get to make this come alive'

Burnaby, British Columbia -- On a wintry day here last year, Zack Snyder hunkered down in a dank prison cell, peered between the bars and watched bloodthirsty inmates run riot. All the smoke and screams only made him smile; the fiery cellblock he saw before him looked nearly identical to the one in the hand-drawn pages of " Watchmen," the landmark 1985 graphic novel. The director didn't have to rely on memory -- he had a rolled-up copy of the comic book on the set with him.

"Every day I think, 'I can't believe I get to make this come alive,' " said Snyder, who was a prisoner of the page long before that chilly afternoon outside Vancouver in an old paper mill that had been turned into a penitentiary for the director's $100-million film. "Watchmen" finally reaches theaters Friday and will arrive as the most controversial superhero film ever made. Snyder, an affable, 43-year-old father of six, has been the picture of patience in the face of private setbacks and public challenges to the film, but while filming that bloody riot last year he let a wicked grin cross his face.

"We're killing the comic-book movie, we're ending it," Snyder said. "This movie is the last comic-book movie, for good or bad."

Really ???

"Stand by for news"

Paul Harvey, who was long considered the most-listened-to radio broadcaster in the world and whose distinctive delivery and daily mix of news, commentary and human interest stories informed and entertained a national radio audience for nearly 60 years, died Saturday. He was 90.

Harvey, called "the voice of Middle America," "the apostle of Main Street" and "the voice of the Silent Majority" by the media for his flag-waving conservatism and championing of traditional values, died at a hospital near his winter home in Phoenix, the ABC network announced. The cause was not given.

The Chicago-based Harvey was syndicated on more than 1,200 radio stations nationally and 400 Armed Forces Radio stations around the world. Harvey had not been on the air on a daily basis in the last few months, but he did do some prerecorded segments. His son, Paul Harvey Jr., had been filling in as host.

Coming of professional age in the late 1930s and the 1940s, a time when broadcasters such as Lowell Thomas and Gabriel Heatter were household names, Harvey continued to flourish in the era of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh.

For more than 50 years, beginning in 1951, ABC Radio Network listeners were greeted by Harvey's trademark telegraphic delivery punctuated by his patented pauses:

"Hello, Americans!" he'd boom into the microphone in his studio high above Michigan Avenue, "This is Paul Harvey! [pause] Stand by for news!"

He'd end each broadcast with his signature: "Paul Harvey. [long pause] Good day!"

The "Paul Harvey News and Comment" broadcasts -- five minutes in the morning and 15 minutes at midday six days a week -- were consistently ranked first and second in the nation among network radio shows.

"The Secret Island"

Letter to the Los Angeles Times:

I loved your story about "my" island Santa Catalina ("The Secret Island," Feb. 22). I am a native, and one of the times I miss most in my life away from the island is the winter. It's best when there's a good storm. I know it has become customary, but the island is Santa Catalina, named after St. Catherine of Alexandria. I wish we islanders had developed a horror of hearing just "Catalina," as San Franciscans react to someone saying "Frisco!" Otherwise, you did good.

--Bishop Sylvester D. Ryan, Retired Bishop of Monterey

Nipomo, Calif.

Remnants of a life: Mary, Queen of Scots

From Calton Hill, the capital city of Edinburgh spreads out below. The Scottish queen's Edinburgh palace was backdrop for many of the most dramatic events in her life.

Today, Crichton Castle is a picturesque ruin. In Mary’s day, it belonged to her third husband, the Earl of Bothwell. She lost a battle near here, then fled across the border to England.
(Susan Spano / Los Angeles Times)

Too much salt in the diet

Mono Lake near Yosemite National Park is filled with tufa formations, calcium-carbonate spires and knobs formed over decades in the salty water.
(Dan Blackburn)